Reading the Landscape: Part 2

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to lecture to a large group of students and then rotate among smaller sections of students as they responded to questions about the material from their teacher.  This has become my favorite way of roving as it gives me an opportunity to speak to many students but also to speak with students individually about what they took from what I shared.

            This particular afternoon found me chatting with a young lady who began our conversation earnestly.

“The noble savage myth,” she said, “I thought that’s what Native Americans were really like.”

“That’s ok,” I said, “That’s what a lot of people think.  That’s why it’s a stereotype.” 

(With a lot more time and regular meetings with students, I would be tempted to further the conversation with this fascinating video of White Mountain Apache skateboarders, part of a collaborative exhibition by the Phoenix Heard Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2007-2008.  But there's no crueler taskmaster than the clock in the classroom.  I did not digress.)

“But if Native Americans are not one with nature,” she said, “what are their spiritual beliefs?”

“Well nature is important in a lot of Native American religions,” I said, “And a lot of native people practice their traditional religions, but some see the references to nature in their cosmology as metaphors.  Some practice their religion and Christianity at the same time, and they don’t see any conflict between the two.  Anthropologists have a fancy word for it: They all it syncretism.”

“Syncre…” She stumbles.

“Syncretism,”  I say and write the word down.

“Oh!” She says.  “Two things coming together.”

“Yes!” I say.

Now she is comfortable, and I am excited.  This is a good student!

“But what about origin stories?” She asks.  “How do they explain the world?”

“Well, like I said, all native people are different and have different beliefs, but there are origin myths.”  I continue with stories about Raven and the Salmon People drawn from my recent reading of Lissa Wadewitz’s The Nature of Borders.  I mention the Navajo figure, Spider Woman.  I describe the place of emergence in Pueblo cosmology, the sipapu.

“Are these stories written down?” She asks.

“Well,” I say, “When Europeans first met Native Americans, stories like these were part of oral tradition.  But now many are written down.”

“So I could read them?” She asks and her eyes glance toward the window in the direction, I think, of the University of Oslo.

“Sure!” I say.

“Do they have a central text?” She asks, “Like the Bible or the Koran?”

“Well,” I say.  (I make a mental note to begin a reply with another word.)

“Sometimes certain places have moral lessons or meanings attached to them.”  I am thinking of Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places. 

“Young people learn stories about a mountain and then, whenever they see that mountain, they remember that they should respect their elders.  Or a particular cluster of trees might remind you to share or a farming plot could remind you to be grateful for what you have.”

Her eyes dart back to the window.  I am less sure this time around that her glance means she is desperate to get to the library and learn more. Am I losing my curious and intelligent audience of one?  Does she think I have forgotten her question?

“And so,” I say.

No, my timing is right. Her glance is back.

“It is as if the land is a text.”

Her brown eyes grow wide and round.

“Wow.” She says.

“I know.” I say.

The Black River, which forms the border between the White Mountain Apache Reservation and the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Photo by US Bureau of Reclamation

she flâneries

A few weeks ago Roving took me to one of the most beautiful cities in Norway: Ålesund on the western coast.  Ålesund is beautiful for two reasons. 1) It is on the western coast of Norway. 2) The city burned down in January 1904 and Kaiser Wilhelm, who had vacationed in the area, paid to rebuild the town center in Art Nouveau style. 

I traveled to Ålesund from Bergen, another of Norway’s lovely cities.  Even though every cultural guide warns against drawing parallels between one’s home culture and the place one is visiting, I couldn’t help but think that Ålesund is a little like Taos to Bergen’s Santa Fe.

Here’s Bergen:

Here’s Ålesund:

Ålesund is smaller, possibly more beautiful still than Bergen, and remarkably consistent in its commitment to Art Nouveau style.

 

I was smitten by the local museum dedicated to Art Nouveau, and I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

From the owl motif on the banister:

To the modest desk that reminded me of my own Arts and Crafts Movement desk back in St. Louis:

Everywhere was evidence of the early twentieth century effort to capture the symmetry of nature in art.

The story of Ålesund’s fire is perhaps not that different from other cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  San Francisco, of course, springs to the mind of this western historian.  Nonetheless, there was something especially poignant about the museum’s account of everyday people of Ålesund suddenly homeless and hungry in the middle of winter in Norway.  The museum includes a small rotating exhibition, and I was fortunate to catch the photographs of Margrethe Svendsen, who documented the city in the late 1890s and Petrine Wiik, who photographed Ålesund in the years following the fire.

Their work reminded me of the ways in which women see other women in cities.  Where women’s work and leisure might have been invisible to other visitors, Svendsen and Wiik saw women on bicycles, swapping stories on a stoop, and tending shop.  I was entranced by a stereographic card of little girls sharing a tea party:

Women who tour cities, observe and absorb are not often who we imagine when we imagine the urban rover.  It was men, after all, who roamed New York by gas light.

But it was women who were on my mind.  All three of Norway’s Roving Scholars are women this year, and just the day before my leisure in Ålesund, I had visited with teachers from Cypress at Ålesund Videregåndeskole.  One mentioned that I had the perfect name for my work this year.  “You know the flâneur?” said my Cypriot interlocutor.  “Yes, I do!” I said, realization slowly dawning.  My husband, an ardent Francophile, has long appreciated the resonance between my name and that of the nineteenth-century Parisian urban wanderer.  “Well, you have the perfect name,” she said with confidence.  “Because that is what the flâneur does.  He flâneries!  And that is what you will do here in Norway as you visit city to city.”

My morning at the museum complete, I walked through Ålesund and up into the hill above the city.  Rain first threatened and then fell.

   

The pictures, I am afraid, do not quite do the hike justice.  I had left my camera at home in Oslo, and I took all the photos here with my phone.  But that’s all right.  I’ll be back.  That’s how I flânerie.

Water Buffalo Bill

In honor of this week’s Western History Association meeting in Tucson, Arizona, I am sharing what I consider to be my greatest find thus far in Norway: a Tarzan comic book featuring Wild West show performer Buffalo Bill…in Norwegian!

What was Buffalo Bill doing in the jungles of Africa hanging with the Apenes Konge?  Well, since I don’t speak Norwegian, at first it appeared to me that he had arrived to wrestle a triceratops and battle a tank.  But, no – turns out the tank is in a separate story.

I confess that I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Buffalo Bill sharing the page with another iconic figure of nineteenth-century primitivism.  As the historian Louis Warren well explains, Buffalo Bill (William Cody) was both a malleable cultural symbol and a man who knew his own symbolic power.  He even served as inspiration for parts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Who’s to say Cody didn’t have something to do with Tarzan too? 

In presentations to high school students here in Norway, Tarzan has even come up and allowed me to mention my fabulous flea market find.  In a presentation on Native Americans, I describe the stereotypes of the “savage savage” and the “noble savage” and how such stereotypes affect contemporary native people. 

English is a part of the core curriculum in Norway, and students are quite proficient in the language.  The term “savage,” however is new to most of them, and I have struggled to describe it.  Teachers are reluctant to allow Norwegian in their English classrooms, so I have cast about for synonyms in English with which teenagers might be familiar: “Um…primitive….simple….” I pause and gesture to the phrases on the screen while I stall for time. “It can be both an adjective and a noun….and…um…It means uncivilized.”  In one class, somewhat to the teacher’s consternation, the students began to chatter in Norwegian. “Villmann?” They asked.  “Yes!” I said.  We moved on, but one student frowned and squirmed for the remainder of our time.  Finally, at the end, she asked, “Villmann?  Like Tarzan?”  “Yes!” I said again, thrilled to babble on about my new comic book.  I thought the student had great historical insight.  Indeed, as my colleague Rachel St. John pointed out when I mentioned the comic to her: “How very nineteenth century!”

 

Except that the comic book is from 1977.

How can this be? Well, let’s contextualize, shall we?

A little B+ research (that’s Googling for those of you who have just joined the blog) revealed that there was a major oil blowout in the North Sea in 1977.  In fact, it was the worst in Norwegian history.  I was initially elated to discover this.  Not, you know, because I’m happy about oil spills, but because that would explain the environmental anxiety of the story.  Tarzan frets over the water buffalo, worried that it will be taken to the United States for Buffalo Bill’s show.  Later, when the triceratops shows up, Tarzan is more successful than Buffalo Bill in subduing it.  And he is utterly scornful when Buffalo Bill starts dropping the names of his fellow celebrities.  

No doubt there was a fair amount of anxiety about humans’ mastery of nature following the 1977 blowout.  Such wrangling over who gets top billing as Chief Wrangler makes sense.  Does nature require a gentle touch or a firm hand?

All this was great.  Except that the blowout occurred in April of 1977, and the comic book must be from late February or March, thus its injunction to “Kjøp nytt Tarzan 19. Mars!”

So, what was going on in 1977 before April?  Some more B+ research revealed that concern over African wildlife hunting – particularly elephant hunting for ivory – was acute in 1977.  Kenya banned the hunting of all wildlife that year, and 1977 remains the cutoff for import of wild ivory to the United States.  My guess is that the triceratops and the water buffalo were stand-ins for elephants. (But I’d have to do A-level research to be sure.) 

Could the beauty of primitive Africa have arrived on U.S. shores?  Not if Tarzan had anything to do with it.  At the close of the issue, Buffalo Bill offers Tarzan a job as an animal trainer and a role as the “Savage of Borneo.”  

Tarzan gives him a scornful look before taking the triceratops back to its homeland.  In the final frame, Buffalo Bill announces that he’ll never understand foreigners.  It would appear that 1977 Tarzan had a few more economic options than did 1877 Native American performers. 

And Native Americans, of course, aren’t foreigners.  Students here still watch the Simpsons and are delighted to review the episode “Much Apu about Nothing,” in which an Indian American becomes a citizen like his friend, Homer, a self-proclaimed “native American” whose daughter reminds him not to forget the first American Indians.  Regardless of their English ability, most students here seem to catch on that the plot of Dances with Wolves is familiar…they’ve seen this story before…of course…Avatar! 

But whether they’re in the pages of a comic book or on the rodeo stage or in outer space, we ask a lot of our villmenn.  They must achieve, nay, embody an understanding of nature that their observers do not have.  I teach the meaning of the word, but ultimately my students here know better before they walk into my class.  Whether noble or brutal, there’s no such thing as a savage.

    

Nature Bingo

Recently my son asked that I discuss him less online. 

“Of course.” I said.

But then I learned he had played Nature Bingo at a sculpture fair for children.

“May I talk about Nature Bingo on my blog?” I asked.

“Only if you don’t mention me,” he said.

“But I wasn’t even there,” I said. “How can I describe it without mentioning you?”

“You could say this,” he said. “Recently, my family learned how to play Nature Bingo.  They learned at a sculpture fair.  You find things outside like rocks and pine cones.  We had everything we needed except a bird song.  But then a crow cawed and so we won.”

“Are you talking about Nature Bingo?” asked my husband.

“Yes,” I said, “But I am not supposed to mention anyone by name.” 

“Can I be Commander Cool?” asked my husband.

“Of course,” I said. “How did you know to look for a bird song and not just a bird?” I asked. 

“The squares were marked with an eye, a hand, and an ear,” said Commander Cool.

“Cool!” I said.

“Commander Cool,” said my son.

And that is how you play Nature Bingo.

My family came home at sunset and took this lovely picture.

Trees Are A Peacetime Invention

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of visiting the Norwegian National Centre for Foreign Languages in Education (www.fremmedspraksenteret.no) in Halden, near the Swedish border.  While there, members of the center took me and my fellow roving scholars to observe lower and upper secondary schools. The trip provided a good foundation for the workshops that I’m sharing with upper secondary students here and included a fantastic tour and dinner at the Fredriksten Fortress, constructed in 1661 when a new border with Sweden necessitated fortifications.  

I am relatively untraveled in Europe, and I marveled at everything from the thick walls of the gates to the cobblestone streets inside the Citadel to the cannons to the image conjured by our guide of a bakery and brewery serving the fortress’s residents.  The superior photos of my fellow rover, Sarah Benson, will illustrate:

  

I thought that my fellow historians would especially appreciate an astute local-saying regarding history, memory and Swedish King Charles XII, who died in a siege of the fortress in 1718.  Conspiracy theories have surrounded his death since it occurred, and some believe that he was killed by his own men.  The evidence for such a conclusion is shaky at best, but the story brings many tourists to the fortress.  As a result, residents of Halden like to say, “Long live the death of the king!”

            What struck me most, however, was our guide’s observation that “Trees are a peacetime invention.” Fredriksten now serves as a park and amphitheatre, and trees dotted the hillside along the back of the fortress and sheltered the outdoor concert space.  But none were there during the fortress’s fighting days.  According to our guide, trees interfere with sight lines and those we were enjoying had grown since the fortress ceased to serve military purposes. 

            The comment was much on my mind for the following two weeks as my son began to struggle with the language barrier at his school.  I’m not fond of martial metaphors to describe family relations. And school mornings have not been a war.  Nonetheless, battle may come close to being the appropriate word.  His school has been warm and welcoming, and we know we are hardly the first parents to navigate a classroom without the native language.  Still, exhausted by struggling with the challenge of learning a new system in a new language, we have gratefully greeted Friday afternoon, having lived to fight another day.

 

Weekends brought more time in English, our own schedule, and, not least, trees.  We hiked among the trees in the forest above the city.  

We picked mushrooms under dripping branches on a rainy Sunday morning.  

On school days, I would look to the trees after I dropped my son off and marvel at the timely arrival of autumn.  My son brought home pictures of leaves labeled in Norwegian and colored them in red, gold, and brown.

 

A morning came when my son and I walked to school peacefully.  We went through a nearby park and watched the leaves swirl in a pond. And as we went, we talked about inventions. 

Reading the Landscape

Environmental historians speak often of “reading the landscape.”  They see signs of glaciation from the rich soil of the upper Midwestern United States to the rocky inlets along the fjords here in Norway.  They note a tree that grew towards the light, perhaps away from a wall or the shade of its neighbors.  They note built paths that take them through a park along approved routes and maverick paths that beeline towards a swing set.  

Rarely, however, do environmental historians mean something so literal as reading words written on the land, but that was one of the first and most intriguing sights that I encountered in our new neighborhood in Oslo:

What struck me most was, first, that it was graffiti written directly onto a rock wall and, second, that it was graffiti that was protected and displayed as if it were in a museum – with a plastic cover and a wall plaque:

The text reads in Norwegian: Ver Tro Mot H7 meaning: Be true to King Haakon VII.

A little internet research (and, I confess, some possibly questionable background knowledge culled from Joe Nesbø’s The Redbreast) revealed that the graffiti dates from World War II and enjoined Norwegians to be faithful to the king during the Nazi occupation of Norway.

Altogether, the graffiti and its preservation strike me as distinctly Norwegian.  Here, in a round-about way, is why:

  

I commonly begin my environmental history class by describing one of my favorite walks in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park.  The walk used to take me past my own potted, dwarf lemon tree and the manicured lawns of tony Los Feliz, across a major street with four lanes of traffic, past a golf course, onto a hiking trail, within sight of Griffith Park Observatory and the Hollywood sign, and back home to my little lemon tree.  I ask my students to identify when I am closest to nature on the walk and when I am farthest away.  A couple of years ago a student said that the view of the Hollywood sign took me farthest from nature.  “What’s a better example of human culture defiling the landscape than writing a word on the land itself?” he challenged.  “And what’s a better sign of the dregs of civilization than Hollywood?” he continued. 

Here in Norway, something like the Hollywood sign is indeed hard to imagine.  Reverence for nature is a part of the Norwegian national character, perhaps best illustrated in the concept of allemannsrett, translated as freedom to roam or everyman’s right.  Norwegians can hike, camp, gather mushrooms, pick berries, assemble a bouquet, canoe and otherwise enjoy the outdoors on almost any uncultivated land -- of which there’s a lot in Norway.   Yet, there’s no tragedy of the commons here – the right relies on the assumption that Norwegians will protect such spaces, and here’s what’s incredible to this American: They do! 

So valuable is nature to Norwegians that their rights depend on its protection.  Everyone has freedom to roam so everyone better take care of where they’re roaming. Thus my surprise at seeing graffiti on a rock wall.   There’s a lot of graffiti in Oslo, but defiling a rock wall, even in an urban park, seemed beyond the pale to me at first glance.  But, of course, this was historical graffiti, and apparently the H7 monogram was a common tag on buildings, fences and other man-made structures during the war.  What’s more Norwegian than to demand loyalty to Norway on a piece of nature? Buildings and fences might not last.   A rock, however, is likely to persevere.  Norwegians will guarantee it.

The City and The Country

            The stunning fjords? The bright Scandinavian summer sun? The first stroll in a European city?  Nei!  What turned my son’s head, what steeled his will to overcome his jet lag and culture shock, what first tickled him was…garbage. 

I had a hint when he marveled at our toilet, outfitted with different buttons for solid and liquid waste.  He’s familiar with such toilets from public places at home – he knows when to pull up on the green handle.  Nonetheless, when I explained the two different buttons on our toilet in our apartment here, he exclaimed: “That’s a really great toilet!” 

            A couple of days later we took a ferry to a neighboring island with a fellow Fulbrighter, Sarah.

  Rain threatened, but we took our chances and headed off to explore Langøyene.

Langøyene was once two islands, but has been joined with landfill.  That might have been the source of all the, well, garbage.  Broken crockery clinked in the waves. 

In addition to his greatest find: a rusted plug (I think),

Kevin also found a broken bottle top worn smooth by the waves and a number of shells.  Sarah spotted a lovely bit of pottery that we intend to give to my mom for mosaic making.

            His appetite for the detritus of civilization satisfied, Kevin could finally give his attention to some of the more natural features of the island.  He clambered over a few rocks,

 

steered clear of a flock of geese,

and mourned the loss of a crab shell that crumbled in his pocket.

His agony was brief.  The next day Sarah presented him with a perfectly whole crab shell in a lovely jewelry box.

  

Later, as we headed toward the troll statue across from the Holmenkollen ski jump, he told me:

“It’s amazing to have all this,” he gestured at the trees and clouds, “right here in a city.”

There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

Whatever Norwegian first thought of the saying: “There’s no bad weather, only bad clothing,” evidently had never spent a summer in St. Louis.  One could, I suppose, go naked, but even that would be uncomfortable.  Even summer is a misnomer because there are actually five seasons between Spring and Fall in St. Louis.  They are: Tornado, Allergies, Bugs Biting You, Regular Summer, Unbearable Heat, and Other Allergies.  Needless to say, such seasons are not marked on the calendar with the same happy festivals that commemorate solstices and harvests.

But this summer has been different.  As early as June, I began remarking on it to friends.  “Is this what halcyon means?” I asked.  The weather was not too hot or too cold.  A pleasant breeze blew. A friend at a neighborhood café said, “I don’t know.”  “I think it’s halcyon.” I said with certainty. 

Ignoring all the advice I give my students about looking words up before using them, I began to use the word, if only in my thoughts, to describe the whole summer.  That perfect temperature beckoned me and my dog to Forest Park day after day.  That pleasant breeze blew as I watched my fig tree, from a stump of eighteen inches surge past the fence line of our yard.  “By August,” I thought, “it will be over twelve feet high.”  We had some hot days, but they were close enough to the halcyon ones that I forgot them quickly.

And that perfect temperature and perfect breeze followed us across the country.  From a day at Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Amusement Park with my in-laws to an afternoon watching the monsoon clouds gather over the Sangre de Cristos in Santa Fe to one last picnic with friends in the neighborhood, all I could think was “These are the halcyon days.”

By the time of our departure to Norway, the phrase had become a habit.  Our last day in the U.S., I finally looked up the word.  “Denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically calm and peaceful,” the Oxford English Dictionary told me.  All summer, Norway had been on the horizon.  All summer, I had seen the weather I called halcyon as a good sign.  Turns out that a word I thought meant auspicious actually means nostalgic.

No matter.  Our last day, we drove through 90-degree (Fahrenheit) temperatures to deliver our cars to my husband’s aunt and uncle in St. Charles.  Missouri.  My thighs were sticking to the car seat.  My aunt drove us back to St. Louis on the return trip.  We got stuck in traffic.  The light glared.  We all sweated.  I asked to listen to a cd my husband made for himself and his friends.  It opened with a cover of “Joy Round My Brain,” which you can listen to here:

It was halcyon.